ISAD(G) Explained: A Practical Guide for Archivists

If you have ever opened a box of records and wondered where to begin describing them, ISAD(G) is the framework built for exactly that moment. The General International Standard Archival Description gives archivists a shared vocabulary and a consistent structure, so that a finding aid created in one repository can be read and understood by researchers and colleagues anywhere. This guide walks through the two ideas that make ISAD(G) work in practice: describing material at multiple levels, and grouping the standard's elements into areas you can actually remember.

ISAD(G) is built around the principle that archives are arranged hierarchically and should be described that way. You begin with the broadest unit and work downwards, adding detail at each step. The four levels you will meet most often are:

1. Fonds — the entire body of records created by one organisation, family, or person in the course of their activity.
2. Series — groupings within the fonds that share a function or record type, such as correspondence, minutes, or photographs.
3. File — a folder or unit holding related documents, for example the papers relating to a single project or year.
4. Item — the smallest described unit: one letter, one report, one photograph.

Imagine a fictional regional choir that donates its archive. The fonds is everything the choir produced over its lifetime. Within it sits a series of rehearsal schedules and a series of concert programmes. A file might hold all the programmes from a particular season, and a single printed programme is an item. You are not obliged to describe every level for every collection; the standard simply insists that whatever levels you do use, they nest sensibly inside one another.

The cardinal rule of multi-level description is to give information relevant to the level you are describing, and never to repeat at a lower level what you have already stated higher up. This is the principle of non-repetition of information, and it is what keeps a finding aid readable. State the choir's full administrative history once, at the fonds level. The file holding one season's programmes inherits that context automatically; it does not need to restate who the choir was or when it was founded.

This is why a single photograph means little on its own, but means a great deal when you know it sits within a series documenting a specific function of a specific creator. Provenance and original order, the bedrock principles of archival arrangement, are preserved precisely because each description points back to its parent. Strip an item out of that chain and you lose the very thing that distinguishes an archive from a pile of interesting paper.

ISAD(G) defines twenty-six elements of description. Memorising all twenty-six is unnecessary; what helps is knowing the seven areas they fall into, so you can reach for the right element when you need it:

• Identity — reference code, title, dates, level of description, and extent. This is how a unit is uniquely identified and located.
• Context — name of creator, administrative or biographical history, archival history, and how the material was acquired.
• Content and structure — scope and content, appraisal and disposal, accruals, and the system of arrangement.
• Conditions of access and use — access conditions, copyright, language and script, physical characteristics, and any finding aids.
• Allied materials — the existence of originals or copies, related units of description, and publications drawing on the material.
• Notes — anything that does not fit elsewhere.
• Description control — who wrote the description, the rules followed, and when it was created or revised.

Of these, ISAD(G) singles out a handful as essential for any exchange of descriptions: reference code, title, creator, dates, extent, and level of description. If you record nothing else, record these. Everything else adds richness, but those six make a description usable and shareable.

In practice, ISAD(G) gives you a top-down workflow. Sketch the hierarchy first, describe the fonds, then move down through series and files only as far as your time and the collection's significance warrant. Keep shared context at the top, keep each description tied to its parent, and lean on the seven areas as a checklist. The result is a finding aid that a researcher can navigate intuitively, and that another archivist can extend without unpicking your work.

ISAD(G) is also deliberately content-neutral: it tells you what to describe and at what level, not which words to use for names and subjects. That is why it pairs naturally with companion standards for authority records and encoding, letting you express the same hierarchy in a machine-readable finding aid. Master the levels and the areas, and the rest of the archival description landscape becomes far less daunting.